9/28/2008I've been super busy with school this semester -- no time for Atheist Nexus, sadly!!If anyone who's around here a lot wants me to toss them moderation privileges to run this group or anything, just send me (Sara) a message! Thanks!

11/14/2009Removed ability to send mass messages to everyone in the group. At 1000+ members, that seems like asking for spam.

Offer still open if anyone active in the group wants moderation privileges, but it appears everything has been going smoothly with all kinds of great discussions without moderation. Fantastic! :)

Parts of Spokane are built on basalt and water flows through it like a sieve. Our homes and buildings dance all over the place during change from summer to winter and back again. Part of my driveway lifts 3 inches every winter. Is it water changing to ice? or something else that makes it have greater volume?

Yes sir, Chris G, we are in agreement. I took a look at your profile and did not see math as one of your fortes. If you understood algebraic math better, I could give a better explanation why a 1/2 glass water has the same mass as the ice created from that 1/2 glass water, but surely has a different density. I am not an educator either, but I feel I have a good handle on Mass, Weight, and Density. Merry Hanukkah! Oops! Is it Happy Christmas? Or maybe Pleasant Kwanzaa? Oh shit on it! Happy Holidays! (including Happy New Year!)

Air in a tire expands because of friction therefore the tire expands that doesn't mean that the rubber expands. The above web site says that rubber contracts with heat as written below:

Whether a material expands or contracts when it is heated can be ascribed to a property of the material called its entropy. The entropy of a material is a measure of the orderliness of the molecules that make up the material. When the molecules are arranged in an ordered fashion, the entropy of the material is low. When the molecules are in a disordered arrangement, the entropy is high. (An ordered arrangement can be thought of as coins in a wrapper, while a disordered one as coins in a tray.) When a material is heated, its entropy increases because the orderliness of its molecules decreases. This occurs because as a material is heated, its molecules move about more energetically. In materials made up of small, compact molecules, e.g., the liquid in a thermometer, as the molecules move about more, they push their neighboring molecules away. Rubber, on the other hand, contains very large, threadlike molecules. When rubber is heated, the sections of the molecules move about more vigorously. In order for one part of the molecule to move more vigorously as it is heated, it must pull its neighboring parts closer. To visualize this, think of a molecule of the stretched rubber band as a piece of string laid out straight on a table. Heating the stretched rubber band causes segments of the molecules to move more vigorously, which can be represented by wiggling the middle of the string back and forth. As the middle of the string moves, the ends of the string get closer together. In a similar fashion, the molecules of rubber become shorter as the rubber is heated, causing the stretched rubber band to contract